Most of my online tech pals know what I’m talking about when I mention the night the Slacker danced the Irish jig. I’m not much of a dancer, but this one night I danced up a storm on my kitchen floor… on top of my computer tower. Heh! Yeah… it was a sight to see; a 265 lbs, 6’2″ man stomping maniacally on his computer tower that he had just recently scooped off the desk and slammed to the ground… along with all the hardwired peripherals and knick-knacks.

So yeah… I’m in that 3% group who have totally lost their cool and let an inanimate bunch of plastic, silicon, and metal get the best of me.

About nine percent of people have taken their frustrations out on the computer by hitting it with an object, such as a baseball bat or a fist. Only three percent have actually thrown a computer to the ground or against a piece of furniture, such as a desk.*

“What ever could have brought this about?” you might ask. If you can seriously ask that question, you’ve never used a computer before in your entire life. Here’s what happened, though… I had been having some buggy issues with an installation of Linux. I kept losing my configuration preferences and such.

It was really beginning to torque me up. It had been going on for about two weeks. It came to a head one evening shortly after another crash of a fresh installation. That’s when the dance party started. WOO-HOO! Everybody dance now! THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

After a reassembly into another tower box and some more calm-minded troubleshooting, I tracked the issue to an intermittently failing Seagate hard drive that I had just recently bought and installed on this system. That was the very first… and the VERY LAST Seagate drive I even owned/used. I’ve mellowed over the years, though. I don’t blame Seagate anymore for my near-stroke. I’d buy one nowadays… if the price was right.

But not everyone reacts this way when faced with a computer issue. On the other end of the spectrum, about 38 percent of people said they would never yell at their computer because it’s “too sensitive.” Instead, they encourage it to keep working with positive words.*